Posts by Tyson Key

There's places without EDGE, let alone multi-operator 3G!

This is interesting, living in a small-ish town on the outskirts of York (Boroughbridge), where there's only a single choice for 3G coverage (3), no 4G coverage, and no networks (save for Vodafone, near the motorway in some hotspots) offer even EDGE coverage. (And unless you've got a decent phone, GSM calls tend to sound like bubbling mud on some networks (O2), since reception's horrid).

A tempest in a teapot

To be honest, I don't see why this is now suddenly such a major deal, given that Symbian OS/S60-based phones used to let you save all of your messages (SMS, MMS, e-mail, etc.) on a removable memory card, as did a bunch of NEC, and Sony Ericsson feature phones - and unless (in the case of selected Symbian devices), you opted to enable block-level FS encryption, they were all stored in clear text, along with attachments, and a metadata database...

Unless things have changed, "3" are already owned by Hutchison Whampoa of Hong Kong - which is why their corporate name is Hutchison 3G UK Ltd...

Also, if memory serves correctly, NTT DoCoMo were also a minority shareholder - but they ended up selling their stake, after they refused to adopt i-mode. (Which O2 briefly tinkered with, before unceremoniously discontinuing provision).

Re: Dr Seuss said it best...

I didn't have a problem with the one from the article - but that Seuss one was a pain in the arse to read, as an English/Japanese bilingual who has a weird "mostly-Received Pronunciation" accent in English, but has difficulty in pronouncing certain words beginning with the consonant cluster "thr" (especially "three").

Did anyone learn from science classes?

Re: How the heck?

I'm guessing they've amassed those from their decades of work on materials, earlier UI/X design work (e.g. the NaviKey, menu structures, and fancy hinges - even if they never used them in Lumias/Ashas); baseband technology (e.g. ISI, antenna design, and power management) - even if some of it was hived off onto Renesas, who eventually flushed it away; core telephony standards; cameras/imaging tech (especially after they absorbed Scalado), and probably whatever they acquired from Symbian, SmarterPhone, and a bunch of other companies, or otherwise developed themselves.

I'm assuming that a ton of patents went to MS, and some troll/"licensing" firms, though.

I can't imagine them deciding to explicitly name SCTP in the spec - but I don't see a reason why HTTP/2.0 servers couldn't function using the "withsctp" wrapper script available for various Linux distributions.

Re: I have always found "BigCorp's" paranoia when dealing with customer complaints very.......

Let your sister have a go...

Meh, just let SoftBank digest as much of Sprint as they want to (70%?), and then Dish can either oust the rest of Sprint's shareholders, cleave off 5-10%, or form a consortium with Sprint to own roughly half of ClearWire each.

Or failing that, they could announce a separate partnership to cross-sell each other's services, with a healthy margin either way...

TETRA works somewhere around 390-395MHz (with 10MHz/channel gaps for uplink/downlink), within the EU.

Besides, given that it's a digital, trunked radio technology, you shouldn't be able to hear anything in terms of audio as interference. (Same deal with GSM, modulo trunking; and UMTS/W-CDMA has its own high-pitched whine - although you can't hear it, unless you tune into a UMTS frequency using an SDR).

Long-awaited, but...

I wonder if Yahoo!, or CBS would be likely to acquire the "Flickr for audio" (which I was sort-of hoping that someone would create, prior to discovering SoundCloud), and let it fester for eons, before killing it off?

Yet another Japanese-based programming language...

There's always Puroderu/プロデル (http://rdr.utopiat.net/) - which seems to pack a nice collection of methods/features into its standard library - including a "Guguru"/ググる method for doing Web searches (according to http://rdr.utopiat.net/docs/reference/core/core.htm).

Re: Stupid Luddites

Good point.

I've found that one also has to disable the use of their insufferable proxies that break mobile sites using complex JavaScript, or cookies, in order to do anything useful on their pre-paid data APNs. Using Opera Mini also sometimes helps, as a workaround.

Stupid Luddites

It's 2012, and O2 still haven't deployed damn *EDGE*, or figured out how to carry voice calls reliably in some parts of the country. (I'm in a small town near York). I have little faith in their ability to deliver an LTE network before the heat death of the universe.

Re: Accenture won't do the job properly.

You've got some great ideas - but I'd just thought that I'd point out that Symbian has supported SMP for ages; although it seems that few OEMs have actually decided to implement it in their handsets. I remember seeing an early video demonstration of it on prototype hardware, eons ago - where it seemingly outperformed Linux's SMP implementation.

Annoyingly, the forum system won't let me edit my prior post, but <a href="http://ja.wikipedia.org/wiki/スカイカー">Wikipedia</a> also mentions the TerraFugia Transition, a "Flying Maruti", and the ParaJet as prior attempts...

Hmm, weren't Moller and a bunch of other companies attempting to implement this for years, with minimal return on investments, and no products (other than vapourware)?

That aside, I assume that it's extremely expensive (like all flying machines, in comparison to cars), but I'll admit that the HondaJet looks like a fairly promising option, in the interim - and it's already in production, along with being approved for flight in at least the USA.

I've often wondered what would happen if Oracle won, and ended up requesting the recall and destruction of all "infringing" Android-based products.

I doubt that would work in reality, though - since it's likely that many handsets have been lost, stolen, damaged, or privately resold; lots of people have copies of various versions of the Android SDK; and the source code has globally spread like kudzu. Not to mention that "real" people (i.e. consumers) will be unwilling to relinquish their devices.

Re: App details

If you've got a PCSC-compliant smartcard reader (you can obtain contactless-only ones for ~£30 - and contact-only ones are even cheaper), and access to a (virtual) machine running Linux, then you can easily read data from EMV cards using extremely easy to find Open Source tools.

Obviously, the EMV specifications are freely-available to the public; and all EMV-based cards will happily provide at least some plain-text data related to what's embossed or printed on the face of the card.

Re: I read here once

Nokia have already commercialised a line of Bluetooth-enabled audio devices (a headset and a desktop speaker) that utilise NFC for pairing - and I think that the appropriate data structures have either been documented at the NFC Forum, or are in the process of being so.

To be fair to Top Gear, they did say something along the lines of "If the batteries run out, this is what *might* happen" when they were pushing the car back into the garage, during the first "controversial" episode, if I remember correctly.

Re: The "Unlimited" Limit

If I vaguely remember correctly, that was changed from either 100MB or 200MB (according to their verbal T&Cs on the "Bolt Ons info" IVR section) to something ridiculously low (either 10MB or 50MB) , a few months ago - presumably as a result of people abusing it for streaming media.

(I'll admit that I used to use Mobbler quite heavily over UMTS, whilst commuting to university, after I figured out how to tune its bitrate settings, so that tracks didn't play at twice their proper speed).

There *is* a FAT-free alternative...

It happens to nicely solve the problems of storing incompatible forms of metadata (e.g. NTFS streams, Mac OS X's extended attributes/forks/other trinkets, and a baseline version of POSIX semantics); in addition to adding some nice features such as "streaming files", too.

It's just a shame that Microsoft decided to sabotage efforts by others to adopt it for years, by delaying a full, read-write implementation for all media types (optical, magnetic and Flash) until Windows Vista - so that they could coast off collecting patent royalties for FAT variants; ensure that proprietary software developers managed to produce incompatible, half-baked implementations; and generally retard progress for everyone.

Now if only consumer electronics companies would implement it in their products; and older versions of Windows would die quietly...

Re: Apache Support

An educated guess as to why an Apache module would be necessary/a vaguely good idea: It's probably so that image files in "legacy" formats (i.e. those that people actually use in real life) can be automatically transcoded to WebP upon request from the client.

I'll be the 5th S60 user then, by your count

Oh, and I'm under the age of 70, too.

I use my S60, erm Symbian Platform devices (I currently have a Nokia N73 that's still going strong) heavily for Web browsing, listening to music - and Scrobbling it to my last.fm profile, reading PDFs, taking photos, and as an alarm clock (with an older version of Alarm Manager to resolve the "can't have multiple alarms, or recurring alarms" issue). I also sometimes play games, plus I've dabbled with Python for S60 and the Mobile Web Server tech demo.

Did I mention that they're also really great phones in terms of audio quality (for both calls and multimedia), and have sane antenna designs so that they're capable of actually maintaining network connectivity - even if you hold them in an unusual manner (unlike one of Apple's recent toys).

As someone who's owned a Sony Ericsson dumbphone, I can say that although they have some nice gimmicks (e.g. support for geotagging photos via A-GPS, a Bluetooth remote control feature, and USB Ethernet emulation/bridging), and last for weeks on two charges, their UI makes me want to throw them against a wall occasionally.

As for this Opera Mini beta, it feels significantly faster than the J2ME version, and being able to use the native input mechanism for entering non-alphanumeric characters is a nice bonus.

Disclaimer: I happen to be a Symbian Platform developer and SF community member in my spare time (when I'm not studying at university), although this is entirely my own opinion.